Award-winning mystery writer T. Jefferson Parker wraps up his first series with ‘The Famous and the Dead’

“The Famous and the Dead” is Fallbrook crime novelist T. Jefferson Parker’s 20th book, a nice round number, a milestone in a much-lauded career spent exploring the dark underbelly of sun-splashed Southern California.

There’s another number, though, that marks this publishing moment as significant for him: Six.

That’s how many books he’s written in a row about one character, the soft-spoken, big-hearted Charlie Hood, outnumbered and outgunned as he tries to stem the flow of firearms across the Mexico-California border. The new book concludes the series.

Before Hood came along, Parker defied the conventional wisdom that says the way to last in the mystery game is with a recurring star. Sue Grafton with Kinsey Millhone. Michael Connelly with Harry Bosch. Robert Crais with Elvis Cole.

Instead he created an ever-changing cast of memorable heroes, many of them damaged, almost none of them the world-weary, wisecracking cynics that populate the genre.

He started with Tom Shephard, a homicide detective, in “Laguna Heat,” his 1985 debut, which took him five years and as many drafts to finish while he was working days as a newspaper reporter in Orange County, where he grew up.

He had Russ Monroe in “Summer of Fear,” a crime writer whose wife was dying of cancer, written while Parker’s first wife was dying of cancer.

He had Joe Trona, an orphan with an acid-scarred face, in “Silent Joe,” which won Parker the first of his two Edgar awards for best novel, the top prize in mystery writing. (He’s one of only four writers who have won more than once in almost 60 years of competition.)

“I think one of Jeff’s greatest gifts.” said Maryelizabeth Hart, co-owner of the San Diego bookstore Mysterious Galaxy, “is the ability to connect readers with his well-rounded, believable characters, even those who make choices most of us wouldn’t, or encounter extraordinary circumstances, or live with special traits that in lesser hands might be character tics rather than part of their humanity.”

The one-hero-at-a-time approach never seemed to hurt Parker. He had best-sellers. He won awards. Critics praised his “moral intelligence” and called his work “some of the finest writing you’ll ever read.” But five years ago, he decided it was time to try something different.

“I’d never written a series before, and I thought it would be a real interesting challenge for me,” he said one recent afternoon in his home office, filled with books and leather chairs and decorative nods to two of his passions, fly-fishing and snakes.

“This was my stab at creating a character people would like and sticking with him. And in Charlie’s case, throwing him into a situation that I thought was meaningful.”

‘That whole caldron’

Parker, who is 59, has traveled on vacation south of the border all his life. “I’ve always loved Mexico,” he said, “the culture, the language, the beer, the fishing, the people, the music, the literature, the geography — the whole thing.”

About eight years ago, as he watched Mexico descend into drug-fueled madness — 50,000 dead and counting — he knew he would eventually write about it. “I just thought it was a terrible thing happening to a beautiful country,” he said.

Charlie Hood was nowhere near the border when the series began in 2008 with “L.A. Outlaws.” By the third book, “Iron River,” he was on loan to the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms for Operation Blowdown, an ill-fated venture aimed at keeping American guns out of the hands of the Mexican drug cartels.

Instead, the guns wind up being used in deadly crimes on both sides of the border. Any resemblance to a similarly named real-life fiasco is entirely coincidental.

“If there was no Operation Fast & Furious and I had written this, people would go, ‘Come on. Certain things just don’t happen,’” Parker said. “Thanks to the larger realities of the border and the American passion for drugs and guns and Mexican passion for dollars and power, all mixed together, that whole caldron is very much not made up. It’s an actual thing, and you can see it and live it and smell it. We do, living in San Diego.”

As grounded as the series is in today’s headlines, it’s really about an age-old conflict, the battle between good and evil. Parker traces his interest in that to the Bible and his Protestant upbringing.

“I think that’s the way the world works,” he said. “I’ve always thought the best way to look at life is that we really are objects of desire and that we are fought for. Evil wants us and good wants us, and where are we gonna go?”

He considers himself spiritual but not religious. “I rarely set foot in a church, but I often find myself contemplating certain beauties and sometimes certain profanities that lead me to wonder whether there is a God,” he said. “I think about that a lot.”

The new book, which came out Tuesday, is already drawing praise. Booklist and Publisher’s Weekly each gave it a starred review. One newspaper critic in St. Louis has called the Hood books “the most groundbreaking crime series in decades.”

Not everybody loves it, though. As the series has progressed, it’s ventured deeply into a kind of magic realism — devils and angels in the flesh who read people’s minds and jump over 8-foot-high fences — and that has turned off mystery readers more comfortable with straightforward plots.

As someone who has regularly skirted the boundaries of his genre, Parker sees nothing wrong with a little mythmaking, especially when it’s set in the West, a place of larger-than-life landscapes, people and dreams — a place of tall tales.

What to leave out

A half-dozen of his early books are out of print now, which means Parker owns the rights. At his agent’s urging, he’s turning them into e-books, which means during the transfer to a digital formal he has to proofread them first.

He’s not changing anything — “They are what they are,” he said — but it is an opportunity to see how much he’s changed over the years as a writer. “I overwrote a lot,” he said. “I would take an entire page or two to say now what I would say in two sentences. That gets back to Hemingway: knowing what to leave out. I see a ton of that. I think, Oh, man, I got lucky there for a while.”

He spends more time now thinking about a book before he starts writing, acutely aware that “there’s a time and place to begin a story, and a time and place not to. As a writer, you need to identify that right time and place and do it rather than hatching something that’s not ready or isn’t thought out far enough to the point where you’re safe.”

Once he begins writing, he finds the going easier these days. “I think I’m better,” he said. “It’s more fun because I’ve got much better control over my tools now. And yet the anguished part, the keening and wailing and gnashing of teeth that prefigures the beginning of a book, that seems to get longer and louder. So I don’t know if it’s improvement.”

What he does know is this: Having completed his first series, he doesn’t plan to start another. Charlie Hood is no more.

Book 21 will be about someone new, an approach that has always suited T. Jefferson Parker just fine.

Excerpt from “The Famous and the Dead”

The next morning Hood walked into Rayburn House Office Building Committee Room 2154 and looked into flashing cameras and the steady glare from the video lights. He wasn’t sure this was how celebrities felt. He was led to the witness dock by one of Grossly’s aides, who sat him in the middle seat, which left him flanked by two empty chairs on either side. He was given a bottle of water. In front of him was floor, and a few yards away was an empty row of seats facing him. Behind this row was another, raised on a dais. Seven men and two women presided there, with Representative Darren Grossly in the middle. Grossly gave him a brief nod. Hood nodded back, then read the name signs of the others, recognizing most. The American flag behind them had been lowered in mourning for the fallen congressman, Scott Freeman.

Hood tried to ignore the photographers by looking out at the handsome walnut woodwork and the black leather chairs of the committee room. He felt self-conscious about the diamonds in his tooth, and resolved not to smile, which would not be difficult. His navy winter-weight wool suit was the best he owned. Nine on one, he thought, a baseball team against a boxer. Who’s the underdog here? He turned and looked behind him to the spectator’s gallery, gradually filling. Tourists? The curious? Committee groupies? When he turned to face forward again, a photographer was kneeling on the floor right in front of him, with a long lens aimed up at his face and the motor drive already clattering away. Hood smiled without opening his mouth, thinking, This is the worst (expletive) day of my life and it hasn’t even started yet.